meeq v1.0

Graham Morrison - 3:54pm on Thursday February 12th 2009

After many months of sitting on my hard drive at the 99% complete stage, I have finally found the time to finish my monome MIDI step-sequencer. A step-sequencer is really just a simple way of sending notes to a synthesizer. I use the 16 columns on my monome for each step, with each note being set by lighting buttons while a cursor scrolls from the left to the right of the matrix.

I've called it 'meeq' for no good reason other than I thought that sounded better than YIAMS (YIAMS Is A MIDI Sequencer). And I've added lots of features too, ﻿including forward, backward and random play, dynamic adjustment of step sizes, timing, MIDI channels and custom scales, plus the ability to add both short and sustained notes. All of this has been possible because I wrote meeq using the ChucK programming language. Thanks to ChucK, I didn't have to worry about timing or concurrency which made the development quite a lot of fun (for 99% of the project).

Unfortunately, meeq still requires executing a couple of commands on the command-line, and this seems to have stumped a few people in the monome community. But if I get the time, I may create a simple point-and-click GUI to start and stop the process automatically.